The best wiiware games

Some of them are excellent. And since Nintendo in its pre-Direct days did a terrible job of actually informing people about the existence of WiiWare games, there are a few you might not even know exist—including some exclusives that are only available on WiiWare, and are about to be not available anywhere.

Note that this also applies to the Virtual Console games that you can buy through the Wii, although these are mostly available on other platforms, and are more likely to show up again in the future. Collect all gems This fun little adventure is a spinoff from a set of mini-levels found in Super Mario 3D World starring Toad waddling his way through small puzzle-box levels. Before WiiWare, there was Virtual Console.

While some of these, like Mega Man 9 and 10 , have since been released elsewhere, some remain exclusive to WiiWare. Developed by the top-tier retro revival studio M2, these are quite fun if short entries in their respective series, with pretty pixel art and gorgeous soundtracks.

Even sitting comfortably in a train station toilet, have an app on the go, whilst you go! However, many moons ago stores like WiiWare and Steam were only just coming into fruition. Now, years after the Wii has faded into living room memory, the Wiiware virtual shop is ending. But fear not! Got some spare points to spend before WiiWare closes? Here are just some of the best WiiWare games.

An charming platformer that stars a young lad and his elemental wind spirit. Full of mystical melodies and a gorgeous art-style, the game is a must-download before WiiWare ends! LostWinds is also available to download on Steam and iOS. To step into those furry paws and scramble about? Battle legendary beasts, play with up to four players. All ranked as one. You may agree or disagree with the decision, but it lets us showcase a lot more variety than just having every other game be a different BIT.

TRIP installment. The Magic Obelisk. We kick off our countdown with an impressive WiiWare-exclusive puzzler. The Magic Obelisk tells the light-hearted, fanciful tale of a young tree spirit named Lukus who's on a quest to put down roots. If he ever lets even a bit of sunlight touch him, though, his journey will be over -- he'll be frozen in place, his adventure over right on the spot.

So it's up to you to manipulate towering obelisk objects in each environment to create shadow-covered safe zones for Lukus to walk through. You build protected paths of darkness for him to cross and ultimately come to the final, chosen spot where he'll finally root himself into the ground. Maboshi's Arcade. WiiWare has become a wonderland for puzzle game junkies over the past few years, and Nintendo's own first-party efforts have been some of the most memorable in the genre.

Maboshi's Arcade was an earlier release from the company, arriving in the Wii Shop just under the wire in the service's first calendar year -- and it was an oddly compelling mixture of three game designs in one. The title tasks you to play "Circle," directing a spinning disc around enclosed arenas; "Line," controlling a spinning stick and launching flying pegs; and "Square," where you direct a cursor to set fire to blocks before they scroll off the screen.

The challenge is in jumping back and forth between each of the three, which are all active on the same screen at the same time -- it's a pretty wild concept. And Nintendo must have liked its individual components a great deal, too, because one of them "Square" was given its own standalone release on DSiWare as the inventive and addictive Flametail.

Jett Rocket. Shin'en is a company well known for pushing the limits of every piece of hardware they develop for, and WiiWare got an exclusive title from them that did just that in the summer of Jett Rocket is like the Super Mario Galaxy of WiiWare, a visually brilliant 3D platformer that looks so good it's hard to believe it's just a downloadable title and not a full retail release. Its gameplay backs up its graphics, too, with a fun romp featuring massive boss battles, a variety of vehicles to ride and a smiling dolphin wearing a metal helmet.

The adventure's a bit on the short side, but Jett Rocket impresses through its entire duration. Here's hoping Shin'en keeps up its envelope-pushing attitude on Nintendo platforms for many more years to come. Excitebike: World Rally. I expected to see a lot more of Nintendo's famous franchises show up with digital spin-offs or sequels when WiiWare was first unveiled years ago, but the service has turned out to be much more focused on original IPs than much of anything from Mario, Zelda, Metroid or the rest of the main brand bunch.

Excitebike is one fairly high-profile Nintendo series that did get the expected treatment, though, with the release of World Rally in It served as kind of a remake of the original NES Excitebike game and also a bit of a sequel, modernizing the graphics of the classic side-scrolling racer but keeping the gameplay firmly rooted in the foundation of the past. I'd love to see Nintendo take this same approach with a few other vintage hits from their back catalog before WiiWare goes away for good, too -- but, alas, my hopes for Ice Climber 2 still seem unrealistic.

The biggest brand name release to launch alongside the WiiWare service itself was undoubtedly Final Fantasy, though My Life as a King is probably not the kind of experience most players were expecting to come from the Final Fantasy franchise. Players who got over the shock of the genre switch soon discovered that My Life as a King was one of the deepest and most engaging WiiWare launch titles, and the game sold well enough to inspire the release of a follow-up -- Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Dark Lord -- one year later.

Though it, too, completely swapped genres to become more of a tower defense design. NyxQuest: Kindred Spirits. First announced with the name "Icarian" while in development, this next featured title in our countdown originally captured Nintendo fans' attention for its similarities to the then-dormant Kid Icarus franchise.

Its ambiance and engrossing style keep it hovering here among WiiWare's best years after its release. Art of Balance. Developer Shin'en has already shown up on our countdown once with Jett Rocket, a visually stunning action spectacle that grabbed our attention with its envelope-pushing style. Art of Balance proves the same team can succeed at pursuing the opposite extreme, as it's a calm, simple, physics-based puzzler that is equally stunning in its lack of motion on screen.

The game challenges you to precisely position odd-shaped objects on top of one another in order to achieve perfect balance, and it's incredibly rewarding when you do so -- and frustrating when you fail. Yet you'll keep coming back again and again until you succeed, and that's why Art of Balance deserves its position here on our Top 25 countdown of WiiWare's best.

They're a simple people, with a simple purpose -- stay standing on top of giant, tilting cubes floating oddly out in the middle of a darkened limbo and don't fall off the edge. Your task is to launch these human-like creatures onto the spectral boxes in pairs, constantly balancing out their weights and positions relative to one another to keep everything safe and level.

If you succeed, you move on to tougher challenges. If you fail, the Fallos fall into the endless, black abyss. And Yet It Moves. An intriguing indie PC platformer originally released in , And Yet It Moves brought its unique idea to WiiWare in an upgraded edition one year later -- and we couldn't be happier about that.

The game's signature hook is that you can rotate the entire world around your character. See an impassable wall in front of you?

Simply twist the environment around and make that wall into your new floor. And Yet It Moves is a great representation of what WiiWare has meant to independent developers -- without the arrival of digital download services like this, games of this kind never could have made it onto home consoles. Mario Online Rx. One of Nintendo's most beloved and longest-running puzzler franchises, Dr.

Mario debuted in the wake of Tetris two decades ago and offered an intriguing alternative to that classic Russian falling-block design. It proved to be so popular, in fact, that Nintendo has regularly updated it and brought it to nearly every console and handheld to come along since then.